When Silicon Intelligence co-founder Sun Kai feels stressed at work, he talks to an AI avatar of his late mother.
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TAIPEI, Taiwan — Whenever he gets stressed at work, Chinese tech executive Sun Kai turns to his mother for help — or rather, talks to a digital avatar of her on his tablet, depicting her from the shoulders up. Using artificial intelligence, she has created a voice and appearance that is identical to her biological mother, who passed away in 2018.
“I don’t treat [the avatar] “As a kind of digital human, I really do see myself as a mother,” said Ms. Sun, 47. From his office in the eastern Chinese port city of Nanjing, he estimates he talks to her avatar at least once a week. “Without exception, I believe these people are the ones most worthy of being trusted.”
The company that created the avatar of Sun’s mother is called Silicon Intelligence, where Sun is also a voice simulation executive. The Nanjing-based company company In the midst of a boom Tech startups in China and around the world are creating AI chatbots using people’s likenesses and voices.
The idea of creating digital clones of deceased people is not new, but until recently Science fiction worldChatbots are now becoming more and more powerful Baidu’s Ernie or ChatGPT by OpenAITrained with huge amounts of language data and huge investments In computational ability Private companies can now offer affordable digital “clones” of real people.
These companies are trying to prove that relationships with AI-generated beings can go mainstream. Some clients will be offered digital avatars they generate as companionship. In China, Silicon Intelligence has named the service “Resurrection” to meet the needs of grieving families who want to create digital portraits of their deceased loved ones.
“It doesn’t matter whether my mother is alive or dead, because when I think of her, I can find her and talk to her,” Sun says of his late mother, Gong Hualing. “In a way, my mother is alive, at least in my perception, she is alive,” Sun says.
The rise of AI simulations of the dead, or “DeadbotThis phenomenon, which scholars call “simulation,” raises unanswered questions about the ethics of simulating humans, living or dead.
In the United States, companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI have set up internal committees to evaluate the behavior and ethics of their generative AI services, but there is no central regulatory body in either the United States or China to oversee the impact of these technologies. or the use of any individual’s data.
Data remains the bottleneck
A browse of Chinese e-commerce sites reveals dozens of companies selling “digital cloning” and “digital resurrection” services that animate photos so they appear to talk for just under $2.
Silicon Intelligence’s most basic digital avatar service costs 199 yuan (about $30) and requires less than a minute of high-quality video and audio of a living person.
More advanced, interactive avatars that use generative AI technology to move around the screen and converse with clients can cost thousands of dollars.
But there is a big bottleneck. Data, or rather the lack thereof.
“The key is to clone a person’s thoughts and record what they think and experience every day,” says Chang Tse-wei, founder of AI company Superbrain. Based in Nanjing, the company also offers cloning services.
Zhang has asked for an explanation from his customers. The company collects basic memories and important experiences of customers and their loved ones, then inputs those stories into existing chatbots to power conversations between AI avatars and customers.
At Silicon Intelligence, technicians are preparing to film a person in a studio, who reads a script and makes specific hand gestures as instructed. This footage will be used to create an AI avatar.
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( AI-powered fraud Using deepfakes People’s voices or similar, both superbrains and silicon intelligences require permission from the person being digitally cloned, or family permission and proof of kinship if the person is deceased.
The most difficult part of generating a person’s avatar is sorting through the data provided, Zhang said. Audio and video provided by relatives are often degraded by background noise and blurry images. Photos with multiple people in them are also a no-no, as they confuse the AI algorithm, Zhang said.
But Chan acknowledges that making a digital clone truly lifelike would require a much larger amount of data, with customers having to keep a daily diary and prepare “at least 10 years” in advance.
The lack of usable data is even more acute when someone passes away suddenly and leaves behind few notes or videos.
Fu Shou Yuan International Group, a Shanghai-listed Chinese company that offers cemetery management and funeral services, is instead building its AI avatars primarily based on a person’s social media presence during their lifetime.
“In today’s world, the internet probably knows you best. Your parents and family may not know everything about you, but all your information is online – your selfies, photos, videos,” says Fang Jun of Fu Shou Yuan. Executive.
Taboos about death
Fu Shouyuan hopes that generative AI can alleviate the traditional cultural taboo around talking about death in China, where mourning involves mourning the death. Large-scale ceremonies and ceremonies Despite the daily expressions of sadness I’m disappointed.
In Shanghai, the company Built a cemeteryIt looks like a sun-drenched public park, but it’s no ordinary cemetery: It’s digitalized, and visitors can hold their mobile phones up to scan QR codes on particular headstones to access multimedia records of the deceased’s life experiences and achievements.
“If we were to engrave these ideas and thoughts like in ancient times, we would need a huge cemetery like the Eastern Qing Dynasty tombs for everyone,” Fan says, pointing to the massive imperial tomb complex. “But now we don’t need that anymore. All we need might be a small space the size of a cup with a QR code on it.”
Fan said he hopes the experience will foster a greater “merging of matter and spirit” and encourage bereaved families to see the digital cemetery as a place to celebrate life, rather than a place to evoke fears of death.
In a digital cemetery created by Fu Shouyuan in Shanghai, headstones are engraved with QR codes that visitors can scan to access information about the deceased and memorialize them online.
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So far, fewer than 100 customers have chosen to have a digital avatar placed on their loved one’s gravestone.
“For families who have just lost a loved one, the first reaction will undoubtedly be one of relief and a desire to communicate with that person again,” says Jiang Xia, a funeral planner at Fu Shou Yuan International Group. “However, it may be difficult for all clients to accept this, as there are ethical issues involved.”
This is not the first time a Chinese company has tried to recreate a digital simulation of a dead person. In 2017, Microsoft filed a patent application for simulating a virtual conversation with a deceased person, but executives at the US tech giant said Later he said The company said it was “uneasy” and had no plans to roll it out as a fully commercial service.
Project December, the first platform built on ChatGPT’s technology, will give thousands of customers the ability to converse with chatbots modeled after their loved ones. OpenAI Ends soon Platforms are limiting access to the technology out of concern that it could be misused to cause emotional harm.
The ethicist caveat About the potential psychological harm that life-like AI clones could cause to families.
“That’s the great question since the beginning of mankind: What is good consolation? Is it religion? Is it forgetting? Nobody knows.” Michel PuechProfessor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.
“There is a risk of addiction, [of] “Death is a substitute for real life, so if you do it too well, it can be dangerous,” Pueck tells NPR. “If you get too much comfort and satisfaction from the person who died, it seems like the experience of death and the grief disappears.” But in reality, Pueck says, that’s mostly an illusion.
Most people who decide to create a digital clone of a loved one are quick to acknowledge that everyone experiences grief differently.
Sun Kai, the Silicon Intelligence executive who created a digital clone of his mother, deliberately cut her digital avatar off from the internet, even if it meant the chatbot would remain ignorant of current events.
“She’ll probably always remain in my memory as the mother who kept up with the times,” he told NPR.
Some are more outspoken.
“I don’t recommend this to people who might see the avatar and feel deep sadness all over again,” said Yang Lei, a resident of the southern city of Nanjing, who paid a company to create a digital avatar of her deceased uncle.
Low-tech solutions to high-tech problems
When Yang’s uncle died, Yang worried the shock would kill his sick grandmother, so instead of telling her about his son’s death, Yang tried to create a digital avatar lifelike enough to video call her, to maintain the fiction that her son was still alive and well.
Yang grew up with his uncle but their relationship became estranged after he left the village. looking for Work in the construction industry.
After his uncle’s death, Yang strived to find out more about his life.
“Most of his work was on construction sites, so his life was quite simple – he worked and slept on the sites. Life was quite tough,” Yang said. “It was just a place to make money, nothing more. I have no other memories.”
Yang trawled through family group chats on various social media apps on his phone. He managed to collect enough audio messages and videos of his late uncle to create a working digital clone of him, but he couldn’t get around the problem of a lack of personal records, social media accounts, and other data his uncle left behind.
So Yang came up with a more low-tech solution: What if an employee at the company posed as the uncle, disguising his own face and voice with an AI caricature of the uncle?
Yang put her plan into action in the spring of 2023, but then her grandmother’s health improved, so she opened up to her.
The experience has gotten Yang thinking about his own mortality, and he says he plans to digitally clone himself before he dies, but he cautions that doing so would not create another living version of himself, and that such a digital avatar would never replace human life.
“Don’t overthink it,” he warns. “AI avatars won’t be the same as the humans they replace, but at least the AI will preserve our thoughts when we lose our physical bodies.”
Aowen Cao contributed research from Nanjing, China.
